It seems everywhere has sold out of the first batch of the new Linksys V2 Media Center Extenders. The best I can find is pcalchemy which has an in-stock date of next Friday.
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According to statistics one in five PCs will suffer a fatal hard drive failure in their lifetime. Last week our Media Center was one of them.
Fortunately it was the disk containing the OS and not the larger disk that holds all of our media. And while it did take 6-7 hours to reinstall and set everything up again, it would have been far more painful had it been my main PC or my girlfriend’s laptop. With those machines there’s also a pretty good chance we’d have lost something more important than just our TV recording schedule.
Before now my backup strategy was to keep mirrored copies of important files on seperate computers via FolderShare. This prevented us from losing our documents, photos or music, but it didn’t guard against disk failure or an accidental overwrite. I thought it best to take the Media Center failure as a warning shot from fate and move to a better backup strategy.
Enter Windows Home Server.
I received an invite to the Windows Home Server beta a few weeks ago so now seemed like the perfect time to try it out. My aim was to build a WHS machine that would run nightly backups of our three machines, and act as a centralized storage location for all of our media and some large datasets that I use for work.
Over the next week or so I’m going to write about actually setting up and configuring the machine, using it to backup our PCs (including my girlfriends Mac), and integrating the shared media with our Media Center PC.
However this first post is about choosing the best hardware configuration for Windows Home Server, something I spent considerable time researching.
